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  1. Comment on The future of AI in ~tech

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    I share your frustration and I laughed when I read your reply, but in a way it's heartbreaking, too. A lot of people are like this (or more like this than they ever would have been otherwise)...

    I share your frustration and I laughed when I read your reply, but in a way it's heartbreaking, too. A lot of people are like this (or more like this than they ever would have been otherwise) because they are victims of a concerted attack against their very selves, to serve the interests of one or a thousand hostile actors, it doesn't matter. You're right that it's crucial for people to want to change, but in a way they were also changed from the outside.

    AI generated videos are already much more insidious and difficult to spot than some goofy racist tiktok propaganda. I fear they're going to slot seamlessly into people's bias confirmation feedback cycles and stay there forever.

    3 votes
  2. Comment on The future of AI in ~tech

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    A few months ago someone I know received from the boomer racist grapevine (don't ask me to define what this is beyond people just forwarding things to other people that speak to their biases I...

    Knowing something is fake does not neutralise its effect on your judgement.

    A few months ago someone I know received from the boomer racist grapevine (don't ask me to define what this is beyond people just forwarding things to other people that speak to their biases I guess) a video purporting to depict Indians preparing Danish butter cookies (those in the blue round tin boxes) in extremely unsanitary conditions. They proclaimed that they would never again eat another Danish butter cookie.

    The video was full of problematic stuff and obvious fake propaganda, so after about one minute of research, I explained to the person it was fake, that such fakes have been doing the rounds for a while now (you can find them online if you're interested) and here's a real video from a Danish butter cookie factory. It was just a few minutes long.

    They watched about five seconds of the video starting from second 20 or so. Then they moved the timeline a couple minutes in and watched another ten seconds. Then they closed the video and said "yeah, I'm still never going to eat those cookies again."

    What is anyone supposed to do about that level of dissociation from reality?

    12 votes
  3. Comment on A "Real BMO" local AI Agent with a Raspberry Pi and Ollama in ~tech

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    The result sounds really great!

    The result sounds really great!

    3 votes
  4. Comment on Leon S. Kennedy is a car salesman now in ~games

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    Because there have been RE releases in recent times, people have been talking about the games, and that resulted in my becoming aware of the baffling (to me) fact that people find Leon a...

    Because there have been RE releases in recent times, people have been talking about the games, and that resulted in my becoming aware of the baffling (to me) fact that people find Leon a compelling character. I think the last three games were pretty good, well made games for the genre, but I've never liked Leon in any kind of way (or the other protagonists for that matter). I could probably like Jill if they developed her more I guess?

    Am I just wrong? Or maybe is this a novel vs videogame writing quality gap thing? What makes Leon good enough to sell people things?

    1 vote
  5. Comment on What is the One Piece? Eiichiro Oda has put an answer to paper and hidden it 651m under the ocean. in ~anime

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    I haven't paid any attention to One Piece in many years, but is this going to be like Harry Potter, where "the last chapter has been written since the beginning" and it ended up feeling crappy and...

    I haven't paid any attention to One Piece in many years, but is this going to be like Harry Potter, where "the last chapter has been written since the beginning" and it ended up feeling crappy and dated?

    1 vote
  6. Comment on Color game — how well can you remember colors? | Dialed in ~games

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    Hm, I guess I've always had all sorts of hobbies that require fiddling with colors for a non-negligible amount of time. Such as game development, 3D modeling (textures and sprites basically) and,...

    Hm, I guess I've always had all sorts of hobbies that require fiddling with colors for a non-negligible amount of time. Such as game development, 3D modeling (textures and sprites basically) and, surprisingly, my karaoke video channel, since I fell into the habit of creating a distinct aesthetic for each video. I'm a multimedia systems major.

    Another thing that comes to mind is that due to my aphantasia I'm pretty bad at recognizing the shapes of things, so in situations where visual recognition is required, I've had the most success by recognizing color moods. A measurable example is guessthe.game , which I've been playing regularly with friends for a couple years now.

    And of course I'm writing all this but this could also just be an outlier/luck. I'm afraid to play a bunch more times to increase the sample size now and find out I actually suck :D

    1 vote
  7. Comment on British Columbia announces it is making daylight time permanent after years of promises in ~society

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    I've always been a fan of the idea of permanent standard time. If people prefer getting home earlier in the solar day they should just negotiate that work schedule with their employer, rather than...

    I've always been a fan of the idea of permanent standard time. If people prefer getting home earlier in the solar day they should just negotiate that work schedule with their employer, rather than forcing everybody else to be offset from the solar day.

    (I have an extremely late schedule, in part due to working with americans, so this is actually to my own disadvantage.)

    4 votes
  8. Comment on Color game — how well can you remember colors? | Dialed in ~games

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    Frontend developer! Mwahaha! I wonder how much everyone's screen is affecting the results. Who's using OLED (such as on a smartphone?) I used an IPS panel; I wonder if that reduces the perceptual...

    Frontend developer! Mwahaha!

    I wonder how much everyone's screen is affecting the results. Who's using OLED (such as on a smartphone?) I used an IPS panel; I wonder if that reduces the perceptual color space, making it easier somehow.

    Also, another thing I noticed was that the colors that seemed the most different in the final results display (ie that I perceived as doing worst in) did not seem to match the ones with the lowest score, even though the differences in score were relatively minor. I wonder how the score is calculated. Is it just linear distance?

    1 vote
  9. Comment on Color game — how well can you remember colors? | Dialed in ~games

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    This was my one and only attempt. (45.11/50) https://dialed.gg/?c=G9P8PG

    This was my one and only attempt. (45.11/50)

    https://dialed.gg/?c=G9P8PG

    5 votes
  10. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

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    I've been playing Neyyah! This investigative game from last year takes place in a huge island world made of navigable pre-rendered vistas and makes use of prerendered video with live actors,...

    I've been playing Neyyah! This investigative game from last year takes place in a huge island world made of navigable pre-rendered vistas and makes use of prerendered video with live actors, constructed languages and symbols, loads of written scribbles, imaginary fauna and flora, and plenty of vaguely steampunk (crystalpunk?) gadgets. In other words, it's a massive love letter to Riven, with maybe a dash of Exile in the mix as well. I waited patiently for it for several years as the developer worked on it (and regularly teased it), and then a little while longer because of Blue Prince (which, by the way, I haven't 100%ed yet).

    We've run into the odd particular here and there where it feels like the game design could have used a little bit more playtesting, as some stupid detail or other can make us lose a lot of time running around in circles while scratching our heads in confused frustration. But for the most part this is a very solid game world where (if you can wrap your head around the fifty zillion made up words) the way things are built, positioned and connected makes "sense" and it should be possible to keep making progress by looking around, thinking and paying attention to the various clues that you encounter. It should certainly scratch that Myst itch.

    The game also contains a number of helpful features that can help reduce frustration where it comes to the whole note taking and organizing side of things. Should you choose for it to be so, it will create a journal with the information you have learned organized by area, such that it can be references easily. There are other little things as well such as marking in maps the way you came in from, stuff like that. I like all of that.

    Previous

    2 votes
  11. Comment on What's an obscure book/series that you've read that you would like to recommend? in ~books

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    I remember enjoying it quite a bit back then, it's very imaginative. Also, back then I wasn't reading books in english yet, and the quality of the translations was still pretty good (publishing...

    I remember enjoying it quite a bit back then, it's very imaginative. Also, back then I wasn't reading books in english yet, and the quality of the translations was still pretty good (publishing here has since gone downhill). I've attempted to read Stephen Lawhead in english since and I didn't think so much of the prose unfortunately.

    1 vote
  12. Comment on What's an obscure book/series that you've read that you would like to recommend? in ~books

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    I've read it when I was younger, as well as every other book written by Stephen Lawhead up until the Hood trilogy!

    I've read it when I was younger, as well as every other book written by Stephen Lawhead up until the Hood trilogy!

    1 vote
  13. Comment on What would you do with a video game style inventory? in ~talk

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    What's my Fetch Modus? (I apologize in advance to everyone who understands this reference.)

    What's my Fetch Modus?

    (I apologize in advance to everyone who understands this reference.)

    6 votes
  14. Comment on Discord: Getting global age assurance right: what we got wrong and what's changing in ~tech

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    Sure, but they could also have respected our privacy by just not demanding any form of age verification whatsoever for another year while waiting for the EU solution, and then we could have kept...

    Sure, but they could also have respected our privacy by just not demanding any form of age verification whatsoever for another year while waiting for the EU solution, and then we could have kept using the services in question!

    Well, we'll see how it goes. Maybe the law just won't be enforced properly. These laws tend to be enforced mostly against very large coporations that are easy to extract billions in fines from.

    3 votes
  15. Comment on Discord: Getting global age assurance right: what we got wrong and what's changing in ~tech

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    The CMD-based legislation that they literally rushed through when everybody was busy dealing with a natural catastrophe is not great because almost no one is going to invest money into...

    The CMD-based legislation that they literally rushed through when everybody was busy dealing with a natural catastrophe is not great because almost no one is going to invest money into implementing a system just for Portugal, especially when the EU-wide one is coming in 1-2 years. They will just geoblock the country.

    That said, if Discord is set on allowing multiple competing identification providers that users can choose from by name, they just might be among the few platforms to implement ours too. It's one of the best things they seem intent on doing (unless they're lying about it), promoting transparency and competition in the space.

    3 votes
  16. Comment on A rant about how devices handle users with language backgrounds other than English in ~tech

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    I had to write a CSV parser for my first non-internship job and it was a massive pain to get it to handle all the weird ambiguous or broken stuff people threw at it. It's one of those things I...

    I had to write a CSV parser for my first non-internship job and it was a massive pain to get it to handle all the weird ambiguous or broken stuff people threw at it. It's one of those things I (now) would not recommend anyone inexperienced do themselves, a bit like timestamp handling or cryptography.

    As someone who occasionally wrangles CSVs by hand (for some reason my bank's web application removed the ability to export excel spreadsheets directly a few years ago) I'm guilty of using Excel's semicolons for simplicity, but the Office team should have stuck with commas and double quotes.

    1.2,1.3,1.4
    "1,2","1,3","1,4"

    3 votes
  17. Comment on A rant about how devices handle users with language backgrounds other than English in ~tech

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    Posting in solidarity, as this is possibly my biggest pet peeve of all time. It happens constantly. I still remember The Witness forcibly being in Portuguese and the devs shrugging it off. "It's...

    Posting in solidarity, as this is possibly my biggest pet peeve of all time. It happens constantly.

    I still remember The Witness forcibly being in Portuguese and the devs shrugging it off. "It's your language!" No, fuck off, respect my system settings god damn it!

    And if you're from Portugal, half of the time they will force you into Portuguese (Brazilian) localizations, which can have a significantly different lexicon. Or if the devs are extra clueless, Spanish.

    Related: I also use the English (UK) trick to force Windows to display metric while remaining in English. But this forces my calendar to be in Sunday-Saturday mode rather than Monday-Sunday mode! Also, I don't remember exactly why but I am forced to have the English keyboard layout installed as well, which I do not want. I've been trained in its use since childhood, but it's completely useless (no additional symbols) and I keep selecting it by accident when swapping between Portuguese and Japanese...

    3 votes
  18. Comment on Opinion piece: I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day. in ~life.women

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    Unfortunately as an elder millennial I can confirm that there are people in my age bracket who may not have grown beyond this mindset. Honestly, I think the machine, the algorithmic brainwashing,...

    teenaged boys, and 20 something men

    Unfortunately as an elder millennial I can confirm that there are people in my age bracket who may not have grown beyond this mindset.

    About social media bans

    Honestly, I think the machine, the algorithmic brainwashing, is 9/10 of the problem rather than the information itself. It's like a bad context factory. So we don't even have to think of it as censorship (or at least I don't), since no specific data is being suppressed. More like dismantling a harmful weapon.

    8 votes
  19. Comment on This app alerts you when it detects Meta camera glasses nearby in ~tech

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    If anyone tries running this for an extended period of time, please share how quickly it drains your phone's battery!

    If anyone tries running this for an extended period of time, please share how quickly it drains your phone's battery!

    8 votes
  20. Comment on Phil Spencer is leaving Microsoft/Xbox in ~games

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    A fairly optimistic view of the future! For single player, consumers hate "always online" but big studios love it, so it depends on whether that particular industry keeps self-destructing and...

    A fairly optimistic view of the future!

    For single player, consumers hate "always online" but big studios love it, so it depends on whether that particular industry keeps self-destructing and giving way to smaller studios or not... I think for demos it's the opposite also; it's much cheaper and easier to just plop a demo on steam in time for nextfest, which is sufficient for getting your game in front of plenty of eyeballs and getting you feedback.

    1 vote